bogan

Bogan is an apparent colloquial shortening of the word pokelogan, which itself is of uncertain, but possibly Native American, origin, though it may have resulted from conﬂation with the more succinct bog. The term is most in use in the northeastern United States and the Canadian Maritime Provinces. A bogan is a marshy backwater, commonly narrow and tranquil, and to which is ascribed darkness, as the artist Jasper Johns writes in “New Zealand’s Pre-Raphaelite Fetish”: “tie-dyed and boganblack.”